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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25739017">The One That Got Away</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/AsperJasper/pseuds/AsperJasper'>AsperJasper</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Newsies - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M, davey is jack's one that got away, okay so like friends to lovers to exes back to lovers?, this is a rewrite of a fic i never finished</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 02:20:26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>14,020</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25739017</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/AsperJasper/pseuds/AsperJasper</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>And then he turned around. A roman nose, dark eyes, a slight, relaxed smile.</p><p>He recognized Jack in the same instant Jack recognized him, and his eyes lit up, and well, now, that just wasn’t fair, was it?</p><p>Davey Jacobs, as pretty as ever.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>David Jacobs/Jack Kelly</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>45</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>110</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Now</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Okay hello in a rare event I'm doing notes at the beginning! This is a rewrite of an old fic (of the same title) which I'm not gonna take down but this is going to be a lot different because essentially I think the concept slaps but I'm no longer a fan of what I did with it so! Here we are! I think this'll be eight chapters? But you know me and I know me and so we all know that's subject to change. Also just a heads up the chapters are gonna alternate between now-Jack and college-Jack pov so you get both sides of the story as in both pieces of the timeline!</p><p>Also! Everyone should go read <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25433059">as you've always been</a> by weisenbachfelded because it's fantastic and the premise is pretty similar to this one and I love it!!! Reading it definitely pushed me to actually get around to rewriting this because it's fantastic!!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Jack Kelly, Caldecott Award winning author.</p><p>Who would have thought?</p><p>Not him, that’s for sure. Not fifteen years ago, doodling in English class. Not ten years ago, suffering through the last English credit he needed to graduate college. Not five years ago, struggling to articulate the story he could feel budding but not force into words. Not three years ago, finally realizing that the reason he couldn’t get the story into words wasn’t that it wasn’t fully formed, but because it was far too alive to trap in language. It needed to be sketched out, painted in living color.</p><p>Not even a year ago, sending his forty pages of paintings that told a story off to a publisher after being encouraged by the few people he’d let see it, or nine months ago when he’d seen it proudly displayed in the children’s window display of the bookstore right around the corner from his apartment building, his name in big letters across the front, two of only twenty-eight words in the entire project.</p><p><i>Jigsaw Family</i> in bright, colorful, looping letters that he hadn’t even been able to read the first time he’d seen the font. Not exactly dyslexia-friendly, he’d commented to the agent who’d showed it to him, only to be met with laughter. They hadn’t believed he’d wanted to change it.</p><p><i>Jack Kelly</i> in big block letters across the bottom of the cover.</p><p>And <i>To my very own jigsaw family, with more love than a million pictures could show even if they were each worth a thousand words</i>.</p><p>And then forty pages of the most heartfelt paintings he’d ever done in his life. Telling his own story, even though he’d never told that to anybody who hadn’t known just by looking through them. His own story through invented faces, made up places.</p><p>A lonely boy, losing his family piece by piece. Cold and lonely, afraid of being hurt, at first. Blues, purples, greens, bruise colors and dark shadows.</p><p>And then, slowly, piece by piece, finding his place. Pink creeps in when he finds a place to call home. Yellow with another kid who fits in right alongside him, supporting him. Smiles, and brighter lights. Oranges, reds, purples that couldn’t get farther away from a bruise if they tried, until the boy who’d started out so alone was surrounded by more love than he really could ever hope to express, each piece of his jigsaw family around him.</p><p>It wasn’t really a story he could get into words, not at all. All he knew was the color of every part of his life. The comforting pink of Mama Medda’s house when he was a teenager, the yellow that Charlie brought with him, that joyful lemonade taste just being around him brought Jack. The bright colors his life was now, his friends and brothers and sisters and everyone he loved, fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle made from pieces from a hundred boxes but cut with the same stamp. Perfectly imperfect, and perfect for him.</p><p>That’s what <i>Jigsaw Family</i> was about. Pieces fitting together even if they come from different places.</p><p>And even though it was so intensely personal to Jack, it had clearly resonated with other people, too. Because they’d wanted to publish it, and then people had wanted to buy it, and then they kept wanting to buy it, and then he’d been a Caldecott finalist, and then he’d been a Caldecott winner, and now the latest printing got to have a shiny sticker on the front cover, letting everyone know that hey, this was a good kid’s book, one you should buy for your kids and grandkids and school library and classroom, and it seemed like every day Jack got a little bundle of letters in the mail from the agent (who he couldn’t think of as <i>his</i> agent because that was just far too professional and official and he wasn’t an author, he’d just gotten lucky) from parents and kids who wanted to thank him for putting a story like his out there. Kids like him, who felt lost and alone, kids who still hadn’t found their families and were drifting and waiting to click into place. Parents who had adopted kids and struggled to find the words the explain why it didn’t matter if they didn’t share DNA because family is family and who’d been helped by the same realization Jack had had when he’d started painting.</p><p>Some things are just way too big for words. Words are static, and paintings move. Paintings feel. Paintings mean something just a little bit different to every person, and that’s why a picture book is exactly what Jack needed to do to get his story out there.</p><p>But here he was. Jack Kelly, who had never gotten above a C in any English he’d ever taken. And only gotten a C once. Jack Kelly, who had never thought himself good with words. A published, award-winning author.</p><p>A published, award-winning author whose book didn’t use a single word to tell the story, but still.</p><p>A published, award-winning author. Him. For real.</p><p>It still hadn’t really sunken in, pretty much at all. That was why his apartment was still so crammed full of the process of creating the book. The piles of sketchbooks full of first drafts of every page, the stack of canvasses split into quadrants where he’d actually done every painting, the mess of reference photos and color tests, and scribbled notes pinned to his bulletin board. It was a mess, and he knew he had to clean it up eventually, but even with the book done. Published, printed, money in the bank for him. The original draft he’d sent out on a shelf next to the first printing next to one with a Caldecott award on the cover. It was done.</p><p>But he had this irrational fear ingrained in him that if he threw anything out, he’d realize he needed it and regret it as soon as it was too late to get it back.</p><p>So he’d merely pushed everything off to the side and ignored it while working on new projects.</p><p>Like this gallery showing that was a really big fucking deal because he didn’t plan on having any more life-changing books published (though if the inspiration struck he’d be open to taking it), but he really did want to make a living off his art. And it turns out that having a good public reaction to a book he illustrated opened a lot of doors in the art world because it put his name out there, and now he was getting to do an entire show.</p><p>It was a really big deal. That’s why he had to focus on it, now. He had a month, and he had to get it done, and out of the twenty-ish paintings he was supposed to have done for it, he only had seven ready.</p><p>And instead of staying home and actually trying to get work done, Jack was wandering around the MoMA.</p><p>“Getting inspiration,” he insisted to himself.</p><p><i>Wasting time</i>, the part of his mind that wasn’t a bitch-ass liar whispered.</p><p>“Brushing up on skills.”</p><p><i>Skills you know damn well you had down by your sophomore year of college and use regularly enough that you cannot possibly justify this diversion</i>.</p><p>And yet. Still. Here he was, sitting on a bench in Gallery 403: Action Painting. Alternating between sketching out the paintings and the people around him, capturing faces and poses, the little details that made people human and real.</p><p>He’d filled about half of a fresh sketchbook when he had a very Hollywood moment where his breath caught and his heart felt like it rose into his throat and he did a double-take.</p><p>He’d started sketching the most recent person to walk in the room without a second thought, without really paying much attention. Dark hair, a blue kippah, his back to Jack as he studied the paintings on the wall.</p><p>And then he turned around. A roman nose, dark eyes, a slight, relaxed smile.</p><p>He recognized Jack in the same instant Jack recognized him, and his eyes lit up, and well, now, that just wasn’t fair, was it?</p><p>Davey Jacobs, as pretty as ever.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Then</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Jack had experienced imposter syndrome before. It was kind of inevitable, according to both Mama Medda and his therapist, considering he had impressively low self-esteem combined with actual talent. According to them. According to his own lovely head, he didn’t actually have talent and he’d faked his way into every opportunity his art had given him. Up to and including college.</p>
<p>Because, like, he’d seen the artwork the other people in this program had done. He knew they were better than him, and he also knew they all almost definitely did way better in high school than he did, and he definitely, definitely didn’t belong here.</p>
<p>This was a good school. A really, crazy good school and he’d tricked them into admitting him, and he didn’t belong here but he was here and it was fine, everything was fine and great and he definitely wasn’t about five minutes away from calling Mama and asking if he could come home and just go to community college instead or not go to school at all and just try to make a living off his art like he wanted to anyway and-</p>
<p>And before he could spiral fully into a panic attack, the door to his dorm room opened and another boy walked in looking almost as nervous as Jack did.</p>
<p>“Hey, uhh…you’re Jack, right?”</p>
<p>“Uh, yeah.”</p>
<p>“Cool, cool. I’m Race. We, um, I mean I emailed you and whatever.”</p>
<p>“Right. My roommate.”</p>
<p>“Yeah. Uh…cool setup. You’re an artist, right?”</p>
<p>And just like that (though he wouldn’t realize it for a while) another piece of Jack Kelly’s jigsaw family fell into place. Race was easy to talk to, once he relaxed a little bit. He was full of mischievous ideas and smiles and Jack had sketched him out in a notebook without realizing what he was doing, trying to capture that light in his eyes and his fingers in perpetual motion. His hands never stopping moving, going from tucking a strand of hair behind his ear to tapping on his legs to twisting the zipper on his sweatshirt to doing and undoing his watch strap.</p>
<p>“I have ADHD,” he explained when he noticed Jack’s eyes following his hands, and he had the same look of resigned anticipation that Jack knew he got when somebody started asking about his ADHD or dyslexia. “No, I will not give you Adderall. No, it doesn’t mean that I’m stupid. No-“</p>
<p>“I have ADHD, too. So…no dumb questions from me. I’ve heard them all before.”</p>
<p>“Oh, thank god. High school was all jokes about not giving me sugar and people being assholes about any kind of stim like, ever.”</p>
<p>“For real.”</p>
<p>Race laughed, and the hair he’d just tucked behind his ear came loose, and Jack couldn’t help but grin back at him, and suddenly he didn’t feel so terrible about being here at all. Maybe he had tricked them into admitting him, but he was here and he was throwing himself into probable lifelong debt for it, and he was going to get the most out the experience, imposter syndrome be damned.</p>
<p>Race was a fiery orange, blazing bright with no shadows. Like a comet, frozen in place in Jack’s life in a bed across the room, laughter and humor and easy friendship.</p>
<p>*****</p>
<p>As much as Race entered his life in a peaceful, normal fashion, Charlie Morris came crashing onto the scene in as opposite of a way as possible. Literally running into Jack headlong, sending both of them tumbling and scrambling to pick up the papers that flew everywhere and threatened to blow across the quad to be lost forever.</p>
<p>Also, his leg fell off. That was notable. Charlie had picked it up and reattached it like it was no big deal, but there wasn’t a faster way to feel like an asshole than literally knocking a poor guy’s prosthetic limb clean off his body.</p>
<p>But Charlie had just laughed and handed Jack the stack of papers he’d rescued with Jack’s handwriting on them, which was very easy to tell from his own very neat letters.</p>
<p>And a week later, he’d plopped himself down at Jack’s table in the caf and informed him that he’d forgotten his id in his room and seeing as how Jack had knocked his leg of last week, could he be bothered to spare a meal swipe thanks bud you’re the best, and taken Jack’s id without waiting for a response.</p>
<p>They fit like they’d been meant to be friends since they day they were born, Jack and Charlie. Like two peas in a pod, Mama Medda said very fondly when she’d facetimed while Charlie was in Jack’s room. In barely a week of knowing each other, they could finish each other’s sentences. Charlie would bring his homework to the lounge of Jack’s dorm room and watch him paint while studying, Jack would force himself to do homework while keeping Charlie company at the library at two in the morning because he’d forgotten to cram for this test last night and needed to know six entire chapters his bio textbook by eight am the next morning.</p>
<p>And on nights when neither of them had anything better to do, they went out to the grass in the middle of the quad and laid on their backs and looked up at the stars and talked about whatever they wanted to.</p>
<p>Sometimes it was deep conversations. Emotional ones, that ended with at least one of them crying. Conversations about loss, about feeling alone or isolated, about how hard it is to realize that you’re different from the people around you, about coming to terms with things you can’t change no matter how much you want to. Charlie was the first person Jack ever told outside of Mama Medda and his therapist, who hardly counted because one of them was his mom and one of them got paid to listen to him, about how hard it had been for him to reconcile himself with his sexuality, how long it had taken him to be comfortable in his own skin and not feel bad every time he had a passing thought about another guy being attractive. Charlie told Jack about losing his dad, and about not quite being sure how to label himself when he wasn’t really sure how he felt about gender.</p>
<p>And sometimes it wasn’t like that at all. Sometimes both of them laughed so hard they cried, recounting stories or just letting the words go where they wanted until they ended up talking about something so stupid that neither of them knew how they got there but it was the funniest thing in the world at one am.</p>
<p>Jack realized much faster with Charlie that he was family.</p>
<p>It barely took a month for his contact name to change from “Charlie” to “Sweet Baby Bro,” just to annoy Charlie as much as possible with the fact that Jack was exactly four months and two days older than him.</p>
<p>Charlie was bright yellow, steady sunshine. Sweet like lemonade, optimistic and hopeful and comforting, and with just enough bite to keep things from ever getting boring when he was around.</p>
<p>*****</p>
<p>Katherine Plumber was out of Jack’s league.</p>
<p>He knew it as soon as he saw her, but that didn’t stop him from giving it the old college try. After all, they were at college, and she was a journalism major who couldn’t leave this art show because she had to do something with it for a class, write a review or something. And she didn’t tell Jack to go away, even when his flirting sounded painful to his own ears and must have been just simply terrible to her.</p>
<p>But instead of telling him to go away, or simply walking away herself, she’d smiled at him, a bright, strong smile, and spent the entire night talking to him.</p>
<p>She was smart as anything, and even after four dates Jack could not for the life of him figure out why she would ever date him.</p>
<p>Two weeks later, when she broke up with him and told him that she was a lesbian and dating him had kind of been a last-ditch attempt to like men, he hadn’t even been sad. He’d known it was too good to be true, and she was very nice about it, and he liked her a lot as a person.</p>
<p>Hanging out with her didn’t feel like hanging out with an ex. He barely even thought about the fact that they’d ever been together, because she was bright and funny and almost electric to be around, and she was one of Jack’s best friends.</p>
<p>Katherine was a soft pink, different from the bright pink of Mama Medda but just as warm and inviting. Like a perfect sunrise on a perfect morning, one of Jack’s favorite sights.</p>
<p>*****</p>
<p>Two months into school Jack was close enough to Professor Kloppmann that he often just kind of hung out in that studio to work quietly during other classes. A boy sat at the table closest to Jack’s little setup, and without thinking about it, Jack’s assignment to do profile studies had turned into page after page of his face.</p>
<p>That happened sometimes, Jack’s hands almost moved on their own, forming faces and forms that he didn’t quite mean to draw, but something about this serious boy sitting at a table dutifully copying down everything Kloppmann had to say about perspective, copying every diagram with perfect, straight lines and tiny handwriting was just…captivating. Jack drew his furrowed eyebrows, his concentrated expression, his hand holding his pen.</p>
<p>Kloppmann called on him once, and Jack wrote the name in his own messy, spiky handwriting at the bottom of his page.</p>
<p>David.</p>
<p>And when the classmate he shared critique with asked who David was, Jack had stammered through an awkward, embarrassed explanation since he couldn’t even truthfully call David his friend. He was just a boy in a class that Jack had sat in on, whose face had just come alive on Jack’s page over and over again.</p>
<p>So the next week when Jack sat in on the same class, when class was dismissed, Jack introduced himself with a smile and the confidence he was trying to absorb from Race, and for some odd reason, it worked. And David smiled back and introduced himself back, and he made Jack laugh with some comment about the paint in his hair, and just like that, David was his friend.</p>
<p>It didn’t take long for David to become Davey, and for Davey to fall into place as Jack’s best friend.</p>
<p>It was different from the way Race was Jack’s best friend, or Charlie, or Katherine, because something about Davey was different.</p>
<p>Race was impulsive, dragging Jack to parties and making him meet people.</p>
<p>Charlie was his brother, somebody to talk to and listen to and spend time with.</p>
<p>Katherine was somebody who always had advice, ranging from perfect to perfectly terrible.</p>
<p>And Davey was…Davey was Davey. Easy to be around and easy to talk to and easy to draw, because Jack never got tired of drawing him. Of painting him, eventually, though he did ask before he did that, and Davey sat for a real portrait. Only because Jack insisted that he could study while he did it, and so Jack’s first painting of Davey was of him sitting at Jack’s desk, bent over a book, pencil in hand, lit from the side by Jack’s desk lamp.</p>
<p>It was his favorite painting of the semester.</p>
<p>He spent winter break with Mama Medda, and he talked to all of his friends, but he talked to Davey the most, and it didn’t surprise anyone at all when they started dating.</p>
<p>Jack’s doodles of Davey occupied almost every free space on his notes, and Davey occupied a lot of his free time. Davey fit right in with Jack’s growing jigsaw family, and Davey and Jack fit together perfectly. Davey encouraged Jack to focus, and Jack helped Davey relax, and they just worked. Really well.</p>
<p>Out of his new group, Davey was the first person who wasn’t a warm color. Davey was blue, but not a calm blue or the blue-purple of a bruise or the lonely gray-blue of just before sunrise, not any of the blues Jack was familiar with, not any of the blues that tinged all of his worst memories and moments, but a bright, electric blue. Like the taste of blue raspberry or the scent of lightning, strong and identifiable and utterly unique, and wonderful for it. Perfect for it, in fact, and Jack had never been happier to add a cool color to his life.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>teehee guess who loves metaphors and trying to show how characters see the world anyway Jack sorts people into colors based on their vibe</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Now</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Of course Davey was happy to see Jack, because Davey wasn’t the one who’d cried for two months after graduation and Davey wasn’t the one who had to deal with what felt like ghosts dancing across sketchbook pages and Davey wasn’t the one who stared at a number in his phone with a heart next to the name and couldn’t force himself to delete it because no matter how hard he tried to pretend, Davey wasn’t the one still in love with his ex.</p>
<p>Jack was. Jack was all of those things.</p>
<p>Jack was the one who’d come so close to drunkenly texting “Davey Dearest &lt;3” more times than he could count, but never quite been brave enough even with alcohol boosting his courage. Jack was the one who kept painting the same face over and over and over again without meaning to only to get frustrated when he caught himself. Jack was the one who hadn’t gone on a serious date in almost seven years because he couldn’t get over his college boyfriend.</p>
<p>Jack was the one who ended up in a weird mood every time Davey texted in the group chat of all their friends because he didn’t know what to say to him but didn’t want to seem like he was ignoring him but but but but but but but and now…</p>
<p>And now Davey was here. Not in Chicago, not at the architecture firm he had been so excited to get a summer internship at and then a job offer at, not states and states away where Jack didn’t have to worry about running into him. Not in Chicago, which was just so comfortingly far away. Not in Chicago at all, but here. Right here. In Manhattan. In the MoMA. Six feet away from him.</p>
<p>The sight of him was bone-achingly familiar in the worst way. He hadn’t changed. Davey Jacobs of the business casual dress for the casual day, Davey Jacobs of that perfect smile, Davey Jacobs of a goddamn pocket protector with two pen caps sticking out of it, one black and one blue.</p>
<p>He literally hadn’t changed at all, other than the fine smile lines starting to show on his face, sticking just like Jack was already finding creases around his own eyes that didn’t use to be there.</p>
<p>Just like every time he’d ever seen Davey Jacobs’s face, Jack’s was itching to draw him, to capture those tiny little changes that he hadn’t imagined onto the Davey that kept accidentally appearing in his drawings and paintings.</p>
<p>“Jack!”</p>
<p>“Davey!”</p>
<p>Jack could feel his voice try to catch around the cheerfulness he was so carefully trying to pin over whatever un-nameable emotion was trying desperately to bubble to the surface.</p>
<p>He hoped that Davey didn’t have him memorized as well as he had Davey memorized, because if he had been watching his own performance, he wouldn’t have been fooled.</p>
<p>When Davey hugged him, Jack felt like he was either going to pass out, throw up, or kiss Davey. None of those were exactly great options, so he settled for holding his breath until Davey let go.</p>
<p>He was so tall.</p>
<p>That was something Jack hadn’t really forgotten, exactly, but…underestimated. He knew Davey was a good six inches taller than him, seven if they were both being honest about their heights, but he was so tall. He rested his hands on Jack’s shoulders and looked down at Jack’s face and again, Jack had to resist the urge to just…lean up and kiss him. It would have been so easy and so familiar after three and a half years of doing it and seven years of missing it.</p>
<p>But he didn’t. He forced another smile and met Davey’s eye and resolved himself to pretending to be completely over Davey Jacobs even though, his heart kept whispering to him, <i>even though you’re totally not, even though you’re still in love with him, still wondering</i> what if? <i>every time you think about him, still wanting to kiss him even though it’s been seven years, still wishing things had been different, and now that he’s</i> here<i> you can’t help but wish and want even more, and doesn’t that hurt? Doesn’t it burn bright blue, burn like the ring of a gas stove, not taste blue raspberry sweet?</i></p>
<p>They’d literally said one word each to each other. Their names, for god’s sake, they’d greeted each other by name, and Jack could already feel paintings bubbling underneath his skin.</p>
<p>Blues and purples, electric and bright like Davey but muted and shadowed and bruised like how it felt to see him again.</p>
<p>It felt like his show might end up being a lot more like the start of his book than the end if this was the inspiration he was getting overwhelmed by.</p>
<p>“It’s so good to see you!”</p>
<p>“Yeah, you too!” Miraculously, his voice didn’t crack or catch and Davey seemed to believe his smile and Jack managed to force any sign of negative feelings behind a wall so Davey couldn’t see them.</p>
<p>“I kept meaning to text you and see if you were free but I’ve only been back for a week and you know, moving is pretty hectic and everything. This is pretty much the first fun thing I’ve done, you know?”</p>
<p>“I didn’t know you were moving back!”</p>
<p>“Yeah, it happened really fast and I was planning on surprising people and then it just got crazy, so I haven’t talked to anyone yet. I guess I should have known you’d be here. Where else would Jack Kelly be on a Wednesday afternoon than an art museum?”</p>
<p>“Well…you know. Gotta keep practiced up.” Jack shrugged and made sure he was holding his sketchbook so that there was no chance of it falling open to the half-done sketch of Davey.</p>
<p>At least this was a new one, not one that was already covered in accidental Davey drawings. The last thing he needed right now was for Davey to see how many times his face showed up in Jack’s work.</p>
<p>“So you’re still procrastinating by going out and people watching, huh?”</p>
<p>“Am I that transparent?”</p>
<p>“I mean, everyone knows you have a big show next month, and I don’t think you’ve ever once in your life been satisfied with a single painting a month before you had to be, let alone an entire gallery’s worth.”</p>
<p>“What do you mean everyone? It’s not like I’m the theme of the met gala, Dave, I got two rooms at a gallery downtown for a week.”</p>
<p>“Well, for one, I’ve seen your book, Jack. Obviously you’re getting attention after that. And I’m friends with Charlie and Medda on Facebook, so I’ve seen the flyer twice a day every day for a month. I guess that means you’re still avoiding Facebook?”</p>
<p>“At this point, it’s a point of pride. If I give in now, the last ten years have been a waste.”</p>
<p>Davey laughed at Jack’s terrible joke, the same terrible joke he always told when somebody asked why he didn’t have a Facebook that hadn’t been funny the first time he told it a year after deciding he wouldn’t make an account out of spite and was even less funny ten years later. But Davey laughed, and the sound sent a jolt down Jack’s spine, and it just really, truly wasn’t fair that he had to deal with this right now.</p>
<p>Seven years, seven years he’d managed to push these feelings so far away that he didn’t have to think about them pretty much ever, and now, now when he actually needed to be able to paint things that weren’t wistful paintings of his ex-boyfriend who he couldn’t get over, now was the time he had to waltz right back into Jack’s life with that laugh that had never once failed to make Jack’s stomach flip.</p>
<p>He was going to end up with a show full of nothing but half-hearted landscapes and portraits of Davey that made it obvious to anyone who looked at them how hard Jack was pining for him.</p>
<p>“You haven’t changed much, Jack.”</p>
<p>“Why should I?” Jack shrugged, and Davey laughed again, and Jack had to take a breath.</p>
<p>“Fair enough, I guess. Anyway, I’m having a housewarming party on Sunday. I’m gonna text the group chat, but since I ran into you anyway…”</p>
<p>“Oh, yeah. For sure.”</p>
<p>“So you’ll be there?”</p>
<p>Maybe if Jack had any amount of self-preservation, he would have made up an excuse. Made up some bullshit about having an event. Or a date. Or anything, really, any reason to avoid spending a few hours in Davey’s apartment after less than a week of adjusting to the fact that he was here in New York and thus a part of Jack’s life again.</p>
<p>Instead, Jack took one look at Davey’s earnest, hopeful expression, and melted. On the spot, poof, any instinct he had to keep avoiding this situation was gone because Davey Jacobs had just the prettiest eyes and Jack was utterly helpless against them.</p>
<p>“Of course!”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>poor jack i love him ajgjshgfjhs</p>
<p>as always I'm Asper, I need to go to bed, my wifi is shutting off in five minutes because it's almost midnight, and I'm hitting post because i don't want to wait so there!</p>
<p>comments are much appreciated, thanks to everyone who's already left one i love you guys so much!!!!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Then</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Dating Davey Jacobs wasn’t difficult.</p><p>School? School was difficult. Jack had never been academically gifted, as it were, so in every class that wasn’t an art credit, he had to work very hard to pass.</p><p>And frankly? This school was full of assholes. Jack had always been a quiet person, and nothing pushed him farther into his shell than people who looked down at him for things he couldn’t control, like how hard reading was for him or how hard he had to try to get a C in a school full of people who thought an A-minus might as well have been a death sentence.</p><p>He loved his art classes. He loved them so much that he didn’t even entertain the idea of giving up, at least not for more than the length of a particularly brutal class. He loved the art faculty and the classes themselves and the way they were taught and his practically unlimited access to better quality art supplies than he could have even dreamed of in high school (which maybe technically he wasn’t supposed to have but hey, what’s the point of being friends with his professors if he didn’t use that privilege to get at the good stuff?) And he loved that he was taken seriously. That for once in his life, when he said something, people listened and made him feel like his words had worth and he was confident in what he was saying because he knew art. He understood it. He knew which colors worked together when, he knew how to pick the perfect shade tone, he understood perspective and form and foreshortening, the only history tests he’d ever aced had been the ones about art history. The art part of school? He loved. And it wasn’t difficult, because he loved it.</p><p>It was just the gen-eds. Math and science and English. They were killing him. He just wasn’t an academic.</p><p>But dating Davey?</p><p>Dating Davey was as easy as school was hard.</p><p>And, as an added bonus, dating Davey made school a little easier because not only was Davey like genius-level smart, he was also a really good teacher who actually liked helping with homework. When he had time, which wasn’t really that often because he was an architectural studies major which meant he was even busier with coursework than even Race, who was an engineering major. And when he did have free time that lined up with Jack’s, Jack usually didn’t want to spend it doing homework.</p><p>But when Davey helped him, Jack not only got the work done, he understood it. And didn’t hate it.</p><p>It wasn’t difficult to date Davey Jacobs because when they weren’t thinking about school it all, it was easy to lay tangled together on a bed or the grass of the quad or sit at a table with friends or just the two of them. It was easy to talk and laugh and share earbuds and create and laugh at inside jokes, and it was easy to hold hands, and it was easy to kiss. To kiss on the mouth, sure, in all the different ways two people could, but also to kiss knuckles. To press kisses to the very corner of Davey’s mouth while he laughed, or to kiss his temple when they woke up together, or to kiss the top his head when coming up behind him sitting down (because Davey was six one and Jack was five-six and there was no way he’d be kissing Davey’s head when Davey was standing up). It was just…easy. Like nothing had ever felt before, being with Davey was just easy and simple and good, and Jack didn’t have to try.</p><p>And it wasn’t difficult to date Davey Jacobs because when they were thinking about school, sometimes it was Davey patiently helping Jack work through an assignment he couldn’t get on his own and laughing when Jack finally groaned and put his head on the desk and dramatically proclaimed that this would kill him, really, truly, Davey, he was about to die and looking so proud, for some reason, when it finally clicked and Jack could finish on his own. And sometimes it was Davey getting that focused, strong look in his eye and not looking up from his book until he finished and set it aside with that satisfied sigh that came from hard work, and it was Jack unable to stop smiling at him every time he looked at Davey and just having to draw that expression, having to try to capture that light and focus and spark of something special in Davey’s eyes that he never quite managed to nail down in any medium.</p><p>Pencil sketches, charcoal sketches, ballpoint pen sketches. Pen and ink, watercolors, oil, pastels, chalk, spray paint once, nothing Jack ever used managed to get Davey just right. There was just something special about him, the same something that caught fire and made Jack fall in love with him so fast, and it was hidden in the light in his eyes and the motion of his hands and the way he looked at Jack and that sweet little laugh he did when he solved a hard problem or got a good grade he didn’t think he deserved, and nothing was enough to convey that something in the stillness of a drawing or painting.</p><p>And that wasn’t something Jack said often.</p><p>Jack loved art in part because of how alive it was. How every drawing, every painting, captured motion and emotion and light and breath, how every piece could have so much meaning in every line, every brushstroke, how he could walk through a museum gallery and feel the life in every portrait and feel the love behind every work. Almost anything could be captured in a painting, because there was no such thing as finished, and no such thing and not finished, because art could be anything.</p><p>Almost everything could be conveyed if one was willing to put in the time, to experiment and work hard and learn new techniques and study the subject and try new colors that might not look right at first but could blend out into exactly right.</p><p>Before he met Davey and knew that spark of life and light in him, there was no almost.</p><p>But after Davey?</p><p>He was pretty positive nothing would ever be enough to make anybody else understand what exactly that spark was without seeing it for themselves.</p><p>Maybe that was part of what made dating Davey Jacobs so easy. Jack never ran out of inspiration. He could draw and paint Davey a million times in a million ways and never, ever get tired of it. Never feel like he was finished.</p><p>Not until that impossible feat of getting that light down in a still image had been accomplished, and by the time Davey and Jack were going out on a fancy date and spending way too much money for their first anniversary (and who would have thought Jack would make it a year in a relationship without getting scared off by his own insecurities? Not him a year ago, that was for sure), and Jack was sketching yet another portrait of Davey on a cocktail napkin while laughing at a joke he was halfway through telling, Jack was positive that day would never come and he would be happy to draw Davey Jacobs over and over and over again forever.</p><p>Did that scare him?</p><p>A little. But it didn’t scare him off, because dating Davey Jacobs was easy, and Jack learned what it was like to fall in love and be fallen in love with.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>i think i've learned that i really only get a lot of writing done at once school is going on considering this is my third time posting in the week since classes have started lmao</p><p>anyway as per the usual my name is Asper and i thrive off of comments on my ao3 page so please leave one if you have something to say!</p><p>also feel free to come hang out on tumblr @loving-jack-kelly!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Now</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Davey’s apartment was so identifiably Davey’s that Jack had to pause to take it in.</p>
<p>It hit him like a punch to the stomach. The scent, first, the scent of Davey’s shampoo and aftershave which hadn’t changed since the last time Jack had spent the night with Davey seven years ago, mixed with the scent of that specific Bath and Body Works candle that Davey always had even though candles weren’t allowed in the dorms. Lakeside Morning, that’s what it was called, and every time Jack saw that candle at a Bath and Body Works it made him pause with that weird emotion somewhere in between sadness and fondness.</p>
<p>And now he was standing here, breathing in familiar scents and trying to avoid the memories that came with them, because this was a party full of friends and he didn’t want to be the one moping in the corner because of the scent of a candle burning on the coffee table.</p>
<p>Everyone was there, and Jack was grateful for that.</p>
<p>By the time he’d graduated college, his little jigsaw family had grown from four friends to around twenty, twenty people he loved and knew better than anyone else. Out of those people, Davey was the only one he didn’t talk to at least once a week, and nine of them lived in New York, so nine of them he saw pretty regularly, too.</p>
<p>Ten, now, he supposed. Since Davey moved back.</p>
<p>God, this was going to painful.</p>
<p>Everyone knew that Jack was still gone on Davey. Everyone. They’d all assured him over and over again that they wouldn’t say anything to him, that they were sure it was fine, don’t worry about it, but they all knew. Even the ones who didn’t say anything knew. How could they not? When Jack never seemed to have anything to say when Davey sent something in the group chat even though Jack was the one who loved the group chat more than anyone and anyone who’d seen any of Jack’s drawings knew that he couldn’t seem to stop drawing Davey. So they all knew.</p>
<p>He’d been in Davey’s apartment for a grand total of two minutes and he’d already gotten a look from Charlie and Romeo, who’d both been subject to his wishful pining over the last seven years and his slight panic over the last few days since he’d seen Davey at the MoMA.</p>
<p>He managed a smile and picked up a coke from the kitchen counter and resigned himself to a couple of hours of trying to pretend he didn’t react every time he heard Davey laugh.</p>
<p>And really, it wasn’t so bad. It was nice, actually, to get to spend time with all his best friends. It was easy to fall into that familiar chatty laughter, to share stories from college and remind each other of people they mutually hated and laugh about things all but one of them had almost forgotten.</p>
<p>It was, if Jack was going to paint it, a soft, warm-colored night. Quietly pink and orange, like a perfect summer sunset on clouds. Streaks of blue and purple underneath.</p>
<p>He started drawing without meaning to like he often did and always had.</p>
<p>Of course Davey had pens and paper around. Jack still knew him so well that it wasn’t hard at all to guess there would be drafting paper on the little shelf under the coffee table and to guess that at least one pen would have already ended up on the floor under the table and forgotten about.</p>
<p>He’d drawn almost this exact scene hundreds of times. His friends, family, scattered comfortably around a room, smiles, and laughter, that soft, warm environment that came from all of his friends’ comforting colors mixing into what they were when they were together.</p>
<p>He couldn’t add the actual colors, since he was drawing with a single blue pen, but he could get the feeling behind them there, in everyone’s expressions, and how soft and relaxed he could make it feel.</p>
<p>He barely needed to look up to capture his friends’ expressions. He knew them all by heart, exactly what Race’s face looked like when he laughed like that and how Spot would be fondly rolling his eyes at that terrible joke and how Finch looked when he choked on laughter like that.</p>
<p>At first, he was paying attention to the conversation while he drew. Not participating, just listening and taking it in and enjoying the warmth.</p>
<p>He tended to get lost in his art, though, and it didn’t take long for him to tune out the conversation and just focus on the drawing. On trying to get every line, every freckle and detail just right, on really capturing how the scene felt, and how everyone was together, how they played off of each other and interacted and fit.</p>
<p>He got lost in his head, like he did so easily and so often when inspiration struck, and so the drawing was never done.</p>
<p>That was the thing about inspired art.</p>
<p>Art he forced himself to create could be done. Good enough.</p>
<p>Art that came from inspiration was never, ever done, never good enough, it never got the point across perfectly and so he could work on a single drawing for hours and hours and hours on end without ever stopping or ever feeling like he was done with it. And that’s what happened with what should have just been a simple sketch, ballpoint pen on graph paper.</p>
<p>“Um…Jack?”</p>
<p>Jack was startled to look up and not see anyone but Davey left in the room. He hadn’t noticed anyone leaving, or the background noise fading away as they did.</p>
<p>“Oh.”</p>
<p>Just like that, the warm atmosphere was gone and all there was in this apartment was scented candles and the hot bright blue feeling of seeing Davey again.</p>
<p>“Nobody wanted to interrupt you. I guess, um…”</p>
<p>“Sorry. Lost in my head, you know-“</p>
<p>“I know. Same look on your face as always.”</p>
<p>“Oh. Uh.”</p>
<p>“I mean, we’ve all seen it often enough.”</p>
<p>And was Jack imagining it, or was Davey blushing a little bit? Did Davey have Jack memorized the same way Jack still had him memorized?</p>
<p>Completely against his will, a new and uncomfortable feeling took root in Jack’s chest. It was, he decided, kind of in-between the blue raspberry sweet color that Davey used to be and the bright hot blue he was now, and it was called hope, and Jack hated it.</p>
<p>“Um…you okay?”</p>
<p>“What?”</p>
<p>“You just totally spaced.”</p>
<p>“Oh. Sorry.” Jack shook his head, trying to force the thoughts he was having away. “Guess I must be tired.”</p>
<p>“Does that mean you’re still going to bed at nine every night?”</p>
<p>“Hey, there is nothing wrong with being early to bed, early to rise. I like to get a healthy amount of sleep.”</p>
<p>“And get up to watch the sunrise?”</p>
<p>“Every morning.” Jack smiled at Davey, and Davey smiled back, and it was easy and familiar and the hope in Jack’s chest was so present that it almost hurt.</p>
<p>How had he gone from so miserable to just wanting to earn that smile so quickly?</p>
<p>The answer, of course, was that he was still miserable and had been wanting exactly what he did right now since he’d first seen Davey back in New York, and the addition of that annoying, nagging hope had just managed to push the misery away. Like a crush.</p>
<p>A crush on his ex-boyfriend. Wonderful.</p>
<p>“You really haven’t changed much, have you?”</p>
<p>“Oh, you know. I’m more of an asshole, now. Success going to my head and all that.”</p>
<p>“Obviously.”</p>
<p>“And I spend every weekend out partying. I’m huge into the New York club scene, you ever wanna be hooked up with some crazy nights out, just let me know.”</p>
<p>“So you’re not spending every Friday night locked up in poorly ventilated rooms with too much paint, then?”</p>
<p>“Oh, no. I’ve learned how to open windows, anyway.”</p>
<p>“That’s an improvement from college, then.”</p>
<p>“I am some kind of a functional adult, now. Took me a few years, but I got here.”</p>
<p>Davey tipped his head back and laughed, and flashes of blue raspberry were starting to come through.</p>
<p>Inspiration hit Jack like a ton of bricks. He could practically see the painting he wanted to do, a portrait of harsh lines and stark contrasts, the shades of blue he could feel building and pressing against him and inside his chest, all spiraling out and forming Davey exactly how he felt to Jack in this moment, sweet and burning and bright and hope.</p>
<p>Not something he could ever show. To anybody, except maybe Charlie. But something for him. It would be cathartic, to get it out on canvas, and he would feel better when it was done like he did whenever he managed to get a strong emotion into a painting.</p>
<p>“Now you’re about to go home and not sleep because you just thought of a painting.”</p>
<p>“Wow. You can read me like a book, huh?”</p>
<p>“I do know you pretty well, Jack. Even if we haven’t been the best about keeping up with each other. Maybe sleep at least a little bit tonight, huh?”</p>
<p>“Maybe. No promises.” Jack smiled at Davey again and offered him the pen he’d been drawing with. He kept the sketch for himself.</p>
<p>“I’ll see you around, then, Jack.”</p>
<p>“Yeah. See you around.”</p>
<p>And it didn’t hurt quite so much to say it.</p>
<p>Amazing what hope could do, huh? How it could dull everything but the positive emotions, like how Davey’s smile was still so contagious and like how Jack really wanted to kiss him and like how seven years later, Jack was still head-over-heels in love with Davey Jacobs.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>sometimes.....you start vibing with a fic.....and you get lots of ideas at once.....and so you get updates fast</p>
<p>leave a comment if you want!!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Then</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They’d made the Plan, capital P Plan, in the first month of their Junior year.</p>
<p>Davey had gotten an internship. The summer after sophomore year, actually. In Chicago.</p>
<p>And Jack had been happy for him! Really, really happy for him, for real, because Davey worked so hard and the internship was a foot in the door and it was even a paid internship, he was the only undergrad engineering major who had a paid internship that summer.</p>
<p>But it had sucked. A lot.</p>
<p>They’d stayed in touch pretty well, talked at least a little bit every day, but Jack was back in the city for the summer with Mama Medda, and last summer Davey had been in the city with his family, and this summer he was halfway across the country, and it was just…</p>
<p>It was lonely. Which was weird, and stupid, because he had friends who also lived in and around New York who he saw all the time, and it wasn’t like he couldn’t FaceTime Davey and text him and talk to him all the time, but it was just different. In a bad way.</p>
<p>And when Jack felt lonely, every insecurity he’d been working through just got stronger, and he ended up feeling like the relationship was fading even though it wasn’t.</p>
<p>He’d done pretty well at not showing Davey how he was feeling, but the conversation had been inevitable, and when they’d gotten back to school and Davey had called him out on his avoiding the topic, and they’d had their first real fight, and when they both gotten all of the tension out of their systems, Davey had laid out the Plan.</p>
<p>And Jack had agreed.</p>
<p>Because two years still felt like such a long time. A year and nine months, really, but Jack didn’t exactly have a great grasp on time and how it flowed, and it felt like such a long time.</p>
<p>And because it made sense. If they could barely do three months long distance, how much harder would it be for longer than that? For an indefinite period?</p>
<p>Because Jack had no doubts that Davey would get the job he wanted in Chicago, but every art connection he’d made was New York and he couldn’t see himself leaving.</p>
<p>So he’d agreed to the Plan.</p>
<p>That they’d break up after graduation. That they wouldn’t ever have to face one of them making a choice between their own career and the other’s, and that they also wouldn’t drag out a relationship neither of them was happy in because of the distance between them.</p>
<p>And then he forgot about it. He just put it out of his mind and went back to life as usual, which was dates and studying and kissing Davey and taking advantage of the single Davey got from being an RA and Saturday night game nights in the suite he shared with Race and Charlie and Romeo and slowly but steadily feeling his feet plant themselves firmly in a life that he actually liked to live.</p>
<p>It was nice to feel that way. Like he was finding his place and things were stable like they hadn’t been since he was seven years old.</p>
<p>And it was easy to feel like graduation was a long, long time away, and so it was easy to just put the Plan far out of mind and pretend that it was a thing at all, that it was Jack and Davey, Davey and Jack, and that he didn’t have to worry about a thing.</p>
<p>Jack was pretty good at avoiding thinking about things when he wanted to be.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>short and not so sweet, what's up?</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Now</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Jack didn’t sleep at all when he got home.</p><p>He spread his biggest drop cloth out on the floor and propped up the biggest canvas he currently had to work with and let all of the Davey blue pour out into the painting that had been building in him all night long.</p><p>He always painted to music. Always.</p><p>Paintings were alive, and it was so easy to tell when they’d been painted by somebody standing still.</p><p>At least, it was to Jack. He could just tell when the artist had been painting completely constrained to one place, because the brushstrokes were flat and uninteresting, and often the subject matter became still and lifeless.</p><p>So Jack always painted to music, because he painted like he was dancing. Up and down and side to side, broad strokes across the canvas in time to the music while his whole body moved in time.</p><p>He had very carefully curated playlists for every mood, and for every friend, and for different times of day, different styles of painting, different materials.</p><p>His Spotify profile was like the holy grail of overly specific and very long playlists.</p><p>He hadn’t painted to Davey Blue in a very long time.</p><p>It was a secret playlist, had been since they’d broken up, and it was a mess. The most inconsistent mix of music of any of his playlists. Because he couldn’t make up his mind how it should be, because Davey Blue was torn between the happy, upbeat, joyful music that made Jack think of how it had been when they were happily dating and sadder songs that were from after they’d broken up. Tossed together in a tangle because every once in a while he heard a song that made him think of Davey and he added it to Davey Blue whether it was happy or sad.</p><p>But he hadn’t hit play on that playlist in a long time, because he’d refused to let himself spend the rest of his life painting pictures in Davey Blue over and over and over again like he sometimes wanted to.</p><p>But tonight he hit play and didn’t stop to plan. No sketches, no outlines, just every shade of blue he owned on the biggest pallet he could find that was at least somewhat clean and a pile of brushes.</p><p>The painting spilled out of him like it had been building up for years, and maybe it had.</p><p>It was Davey.</p><p>Jack was typically more of a realist, occasionally dipping into surrealism or leaning into impressionism, but he usually painted in realism. He’d always liked trying to find the little imperfections that made people unique and capturing them exactly how they were, trying to get the way the sunlight highlighted a tiny scar or the flecks of different colors in somebody’s eyes, the way shadows fell, just exactly perfect.</p><p>And he was good at it.</p><p>This painting wasn’t that.</p><p>It was a portrait, and probably anybody could tell that. The shape of a person was pretty clear.</p><p>But maybe most people wouldn’t be able to tell that it was Davey.</p><p>Jack could point out a hundred things that made it Davey, and maybe his friends would also be able to tell if they ever saw it, but most people probably wouldn’t be able to see the blue figure and tell who it was.</p><p>Jack loved it.</p><p>It was all blues, no other colors present. A pale blue background (ice blue with a touch of king’s blue). Swirls of darker blue running through it in narrow sweeps (Prussian and Indanthrene). And then the figure, done in every other shade of blue he’d been able to scrounge up, ultramarine and cerulean and cobalt and phthalo, all layering and building into Davey.</p><p>It was the easiest thing to paint that Jack had worked on in a long time.</p><p>Every stroke came out without having to think about it, line after streak after circle flowing between the perfect connection between his heart and his brush, Davey Blue playing through his headphones.</p><p>The thoughtful tilt of Davey’s head to “if you’re sad and you know it, and you don’t want to show it, clap your hands.”</p><p>A beam of blue light reflecting off his blue hair “why are you looking at me so surprised? I think the kids are gonna, I think that we’ll be alright.”</p><p>His hands to “I don’t even need to change the world, I’ll make the moon shine just for your view.”</p><p>Freckles in midnight blue to “take your fears and let them go, for the lovers and the broken-hearted take a deep breath, make the world a little colorful.”</p><p>And his eyes, the most realistic piece of the entire picture, to “before we know we’re kissing goodbye, but I really wanna stay the night.”</p><p>It was Davey, the way Davey held himself, the way Davey looked at his friends, the way Davey was to Jack. The way it had felt to talk to Davey tonight, familiar and hopeful and a little bit sad and a little bit painful.</p><p>This was a portrait of what Davey was to Jack. It wasn’t a portrait that captured his face perfectly, which Jack had done plenty of. It wasn’t something simple and calm, or something that anybody else would ever fully understand, but it was as perfect a representation as he could ever hope to get of exactly what he felt about Davey Jacobs.</p><p>He liked it. A lot.</p><p>It was around eight am when he dropped the last paintbrush on the drop cloth and stepped back to look at the painting as a whole, meaning he’d painted for like nine hours straight.</p><p>He liked the motion of it, he liked the way the blues all blended, made everything look like one thing. He liked the way it felt, he liked how he could see Davey so clearly but tell that other people wouldn’t be able to. It felt like a finished piece, and even though he’d been right that he could still look at it and see things he kind of wanted to work on, he was happy enough with it to call it done.</p><p>That happened far less often than people probably assumed.</p><p>But for once, he really, really liked it.</p><p>He probably would have just stared at it, marveling at the fact that he’d produced something he was happy with in one (long, but still just one) session if he hadn’t been interrupted by knocking on his door.</p><p>Probably, he thought as he walked to answer it, it was Charlie, come to make him eat breakfast and talk about his feelings. Maybe one of the others with the same intentions.</p><p>Technically, he thought when he threw open the door, he was right.</p><p>Except “one of the others” meant Davey. Who was now standing at his front door, not only able to see that Jack had very obviously not slept, covered in blue paint and still wearing the same clothes as last night, but also if he took a glance behind Jack, he’d be able to see the big canvas covered in a portrait of him.</p><p>Which he’d definitely be able to identify, because he knew Jack very well.</p><p>Which meant he’d probably make Jack talk about his feelings, and it would be way more painful and way more embarrassing to talking about his feelings with Davey because the vast majority about his feelings right now were about Davey.</p><p>“I tried to text you, but it kept saying not delivered, so I figured your phone was dead. Charlie gave me your address.”</p><p>Jack made a mental note to kill Charlie later for that one.</p><p>“Oh. Um. Well. Hi.”</p><p>“I brought breakfast.” Davey held up a bag from the bagel place a block away. “Figured that look in your eye last night probably meant you’d stay up all night, and I was right, wasn’t I.”</p><p>“Maybe.”</p><p>“Either a blueberry tried to kill you in your sleep, or I’m right.”</p><p>Was there any way to cover up or hide the painting before Davey saw it? Or any way to keep Davey out of his apartment?</p><p>Probably not.</p><p>Goddamn it.</p><p>Maybe he could flip the canvas or something when Davey wasn’t looking?</p><p>“So your two modes are still asleep at nine or no sleep at all?”</p><p>“Guess so.” Jack shrugged and stepped aside to let Davey in, trying his hardest to stay subtly in between his guest and the painting. “It works for me.”</p><p>“Clearly, Mr. Award Winning Artist.” Davey tilted his head towards the three copies of his book Jack had displayed on his shelf.</p><p>“Aw. That’s…I mean-“</p><p>“I think you’re allowed to brag when you win a national award for a book that you wrote.”</p><p>“I didn’t really write anything. Just…painted some pictures.”</p><p>“Still. It’s a really good book, Jack, and you’re allowed to be proud of it.”</p><p>“Um…thanks.”</p><p>“Mama bought like twenty copies. She mailed one to me after I already got one. So I’ve got two, now. I thought about making you sign one last night, but that would have been weird.”</p><p>Jack laughed.</p><p>“I always think it’s weird when somebody wants me to sign a copy. Happens at libraries all the time.”</p><p>“The price of being famous, huh?” Davey smiled at him before turning and setting the bagel bag down on the table. “I got you an everything bagel, is that still your favorite?”</p><p>“Sure is.”</p><p>“I figured.”</p><p>“And yours is sesame seed with strawberry cream cheese.”</p><p>“Sure is.” Davey turned, smiling at Jack, and Jack saw the moment he noticed the painting.</p><p>It started in his eyes, which flicked behind Jack to the massive blue canvas, and spread to his eyebrows, which went up, and then his mouth, which pinched at the corner, creating Davey’s “I’m confused in a slightly upset way” face. Which Jack recognized, knew well, and which made Jack cringe. Visibly.</p><p>“I…is that…I mean…that’s me.”</p><p>“I…sorry?”</p><p>Davey didn’t look at Jack as he stepped around him to look at the painting more closely.</p><p>“This is what you stayed up all night for? To paint me?”</p><p>Jack shrugged uncomfortably, a comment about when inspiration strikes stuck in his throat.</p><p>“Why?” Davey still didn’t look at Jack. He reached out and lightly touched the painting, touched the nose, and looked at the blue paint that was still wet enough to come away on his fingertips.</p><p>And what was Jack supposed to answer to that?</p><p>Why?</p><p>Because he’d missed Davey. Because he still missed Davey, even when Davey was standing three feet away from him. Because he was an absolutely confusing mess of emotions, because he didn’t know what to do about it, because he loved painting Davey and always had, because he loved Davey, because he painted to cope and he had to do something about everything going on in his head. Because he’d kind of managed to move on until Davey was suddenly back and he couldn’t help but wish, and want, and wonder, and hope, and all of those things had spilled out of him in blue paint.</p><p>“I missed you,” he finally said softly. He studied the drop cloth at his feet, not quite willing to look up in case Davey was looking at him. Who knew what he would say if he looked into Davey’s eyes.</p><p>Davey was silent for a long moment.</p><p>Jack felt like a little kid when he peeked up at him, looking at Davey through his eyelashes like that would give him plausibly deniability if Davey happened to be looking at him at the same time. He wasn’t, though, he was still staring at the painting.</p><p>Jack could read the expression on his face. He couldn’t tell if Davey was angry, or sad, or just confused, or something else entirely.</p><p>He wasn’t sure exactly what he was feeling, either.</p><p>“I missed you, too,” Davey said, just as softly. “You never talked to me.”</p><p>“I…I didn’t know what to say. I was…I’m sorry.”</p><p>“I thought you just didn’t want to be friends anymore.”</p><p>“No, that’s not…I’m sorry, Davey. I couldn’t…”</p><p>“I didn’t talk to you either, I guess. I mean…I almost…” Davey trailed off and touched the painting again, traced his image’s jawline with a finger, and left his fingerprint pressed into the shadow by his ear.</p><p>If anybody else had been touching his paintings while they were still wet, leaving marks in the thick brushstrokes, no matter how uncomfortable the moment was he would have stopped them. He didn’t try to stop Davey, though. He felt like Davey deserved to be able to leave his fingerprints dotted in the oil paint, to press himself into the paint and make it even more him, more than Jack could make it in color and music and emotion.</p><p>“It looks like your book,” Davey said after another long moment of silence. “The style, I mean. It’s so…so different. I’m so used to seeing your realism. It’s changed so much.”</p><p>“Not all the time. Just…sometimes. I guess. I dunno. It just comes out how it comes out.”</p><p>“You say that like it’s a magic power and not a skill.”</p><p>“Just ‘cus it’s a skill doesn’t mean I do things on purpose.” Jack half-smiled at the way Davey shook his head. “Especially when I’m…I dunno. Emotional?”</p><p>“I like this style. The colors. In your book, I could…I mean it was kind of obvious. Who’s who.”</p><p>“That’s what everyone’s said. Guess I shoulda been more subtle.”</p><p>“Why? It’s your story, isn’t it?”</p><p>“Well, yeah. But that doesn’t mean I want everyone to know that.”</p><p>“That’s fair.”</p><p>Again, Davey touched his portrait, pressing two fingertips to his lips and leaving a perfect little indent on his cupid’s bow.</p><p>“There’s not a lot of blue in your book,” he said. “Not in the happy part, anyway.”</p><p>“I guess not.”</p><p>“So why am I…I mean…was it that bad?”</p><p>“You’ve always been blue.”</p><p>“Oh.”</p><p>Jack couldn’t tell what the emotion in Davey’s voice was, maybe something kind of in-between sad and hurt.</p><p>“A good blue,” Jack said quickly. “Like this.” He stepped closer to the painting and so to Davey and reached out towards the painting. He didn’t touch it, just brought his hand close to the streaks of bright cerulean and cobalt weaving through Davey’s hair in the painting. “Bright and…and sweet.”</p><p>“But not in your book.”</p><p>“I was going for more simple color symbolism. Warm colors good, cold colors bad, you know? That’s not how it really is, all the time. You’ve always been blue, Davey, and it’s…it’s one of my favorite colors.”</p><p>Jack could feel Davey looking at him when he said that.</p><p>It was kind of mortifying to say that out loud.</p><p>Jack had always sorted people into colors, but he’d never said it out loud. He knew it was a little bit weird, to meet somebody and just have an innate sense of who they were in terms of color, and he knew that most people wouldn’t understand what he meant if he said “oh you’re green,” anyway. It didn’t mean anything to anyone but him, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to explain it if he tried, and he’d never really tried.</p><p>“Still?” Davey asked, almost in a whisper.</p><p>“Always.” Jack ran a hand through his hair, still determinedly not look at Davey. “That’s…I missed you. All the different blues…I missed you a lot. And seeing you again…I mean, it hurt, Davey. I missed you, but I didn’t know what to do when you got here. But it was so, so good to see you. And so…I dunno. So this happened.”</p><p>“It’s beautiful, Jacky.”</p><p>Jack finally forced himself to look at Davey’s face, bracing himself for whatever he was going to see. Pity. Rejection.</p><p>He didn’t expect that so familiar expression that Davey used to get whenever he was looking at one of Jack’s pieces that he liked, one of the ones that he’d describe to Jack in softly poetic words until Jack was blushing and trying to get him to shut up, one of the ones he’d bring up again in a few weeks just to tell Jack that he liked it. That soft kind of wonder, admiration even, that had meant more to Jack than praise from even his favorite professors.</p><p>He hadn’t seen that expression in a long time.</p><p>It made the hope in his chest that had been trying to shrivel up and go away for the entirety of this interaction come booming back in full force, stronger even. Threatening to make him throw himself at Davey and kiss him without thinking about it anymore.</p><p>“Not…not creepy?” He tried to make it sound like a joke. It didn’t work, but he tried.</p><p>“It’s really beautiful.”</p><p>Davey stared at the painting.</p><p>Jack stared at Davey.</p><p>The moment could have been three seconds or three hours and Jack wouldn’t have known the difference. He was studying Davey's face, noticing the differences that he hadn’t put into any of his most recent drawings or this portrait. Freckles, just like Les’s, like he’d started getting out into the sun more often. Smile lines carving their way slowly into permanent creases. A chip on his left front tooth.</p><p>Tiny, tiny little differences, each with a story behind them. If they hadn’t been standing up, if it wouldn’t have been so weird, Jack would have already found a sketchbook with an empty page and started drawing, trying to capture all of these little things that were different.</p><p>“I never really dated anyone in Chicago,” Davey said abruptly.</p><p>“Oh. Um…no?”</p><p>“No. I mean, I went on a couple dates, I guess. But never anything…nothing that lasted, you know?”</p><p>“Yeah. Yeah, I mean…same. Not in Chicago, I mean. Here. New York. Where I live.”</p><p>Davey laughed a little bit.</p><p>“It’s funny. I, um…I could have, I guess. But I never did. I never…nothing ever felt right.”</p><p>“I’m sorry.”</p><p>“You should be. Because it’s your fault.” Davey turned to face Jack, looking into his eyes with some kind of unnameable intensity. Jack wasn’t sure if he should prepare himself to be kissed or punched. It was looking like a fifty-fifty shot either way. “I never got over you, Jack. Barely even a little bit. Isn’t that stupid? Every time I went out on a date, I was comparing the guy to you. Like, oh, he laughs kind of like Jack but he doesn’t wrinkle his nose and so it isn’t as cute. Eventually, I just stopped trying, because nobody was you, and that was what I wanted. That was all I wanted. </p><p>“And then I get to come back to New York, and the whole time I’m packing up my apartment and buying plane tickets and hiring a moving truck and figuring out my new job and getting to see Les and Sarah every day again like I’d missed so much, and getting to have Mama’s home-cooked meals again, everything was so great and even when it was stressful, I was so happy to be coming home until, every time, I realized that I’d have to see you again because how could I ever avoid that when we still have all the same friends, even if we hardly ever say more than a single word to each other and always in a group chat, never just to each other, and how was I supposed to pretend like I’d gotten over you. </p><p>“And obviously you’ve hit your stride, your career is taking off and maybe you were dating somebody and I’d have to deal with that, and then I saw you in the museum and you had that stupid look on your face you always get when you’re thinking about humanity and how beautiful it is in that stupid philosophical way that always made me fall more in love with you, and I still managed. I pretended. I invited you over to my apartment and had to act like I wasn’t watching you get lost in your own head while you drew everyone and I missed when I was the one you’d be leaning against and I convinced myself that we could just be friends and I harassed Charlie into giving me your address so I could show up with bagels and force myself to just be friends with you and I show up and you’ve done this? You’ve painted me and I can see, I can see exactly what you were thinking because I know you so well, and god, Jack, do you ever want me to get over you? Because I’m never going to get over you if this is how you…are.”</p><p>“I don’t. Particularly. Want you to get over me.”</p><p>Hope bloomed out of Jack’s chest into words he’d barely thought before they were noise.</p><p>Davey’s eyes were dangerously shiny, like he was about to burst into tears.</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“You think I’m over you? Davey, look at what I just painted. If that doesn’t just scream that I’m still in love with you, you don’t know what I was thinking at all. I saw you in the MoMA and…I mean I almost kissed you and also almost threw up, and Charlie’s been texting me all week trying to figure out if I’ve figured my shit out or if I’ve been suffering all week, and then talking to you last night…all I could do was paint. I had to get it all out.” Jack shook his head and let out a tiny laugh.</p><p>Without warning, Davey flung himself at Jack and hugged him like he was never going to let go, so tight it almost hurt. Jack found himself hugging back just as tightly, and the tears that had threatened to spill from Davey’s eyes had spread to Jack and he was laughing and crying and hugging Davey desperately.</p><p>“I missed you, Jack,” Davey said.</p><p>They fit like puzzle pieces. Jack exactly short enough for Davey to rest his chin on the top of Jack’s head, Davey’s arms exactly long enough to wrap around Jack’s entire torso. They fit like puzzle pieces, and Jack never wanted to let go of this piece of his jigsaw life ever again.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>well well well, if it isn't the start of a happy ending</p><p>i feel like the paul rudd who would have thought meme with myself since I'm so close to actually finishing this fic lmao</p><p>anyway as always, leave a comment if you have something to say, i love comments! also come say hi on tumblr @loving-jack-kelly! i love new friends always!</p>
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<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Then</h2></a>
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    <p>Graduation came way, way too fast.</p><p>Like, way too fast.</p><p>Jack had never had a great grasp on time. It came with the ADHD, or so he was told. Ten boring minutes could feel like hours and hours, or a very exciting day could feel like five minutes, and apparently, four years could feel like a month.</p><p>He didn’t graduate with honors or anything like that. Academics had never been his strong suit, after all, and he’d learned to be satisfied with Bs and Cs in some classes as long as he was doing well in his art class, which he was.</p><p>But he graduated with only one failed class under his belt, and he’d passed it the second time around, and his GPA was a solid 3.0, and he’d had art published in an actual publication that had actually paid him for it, and he was planning to head back to New York with two jobs lined up, one at an art gallery that would hopefully let him start making the connections he would need to get his foot in the door and one at a diner that would hopefully support him.</p><p>How he’d managed all of that, who knew. Definitely not him. He barely remembered doing pretty much any of that.</p><p>One thing that he’d managed to forget until around March that he couldn’t stop remembering now was the Plan.</p><p>Every time he saw Davey, the Plan twisted his stomach. How could he have agreed to that? Why had he been so stupid? The summer after junior year had been exactly the same scenario as the one after sophomore year, except they hadn’t had any problems. They hadn’t fought. There hadn’t been tension. They’d talked all the time, and everything had been fine.</p><p>Surely they’d be fine if they didn’t break up, right? Surely they didn’t have to break up, right?</p><p>But Jack was too scared too bring that up to Davey, too scared that if he tried to change things they’d break up <i>now</i> instead of <i>later</i> and Jack didn’t want to break up at all, so he wasn’t going to risk it.</p><p>He’d just force himself to ignore how bad it already hurt until it really happened.</p><p>And the closer May got, the worse it already hurt.</p><p>He loved Davey. A lot. He didn’t want to lose Davey, and he didn’t know how to not lose Davey when he was so in love with him and yet they were going to break up anyway. How could he be friends with somebody he knew he worked so well with romantically? How was he supposed to just move on and forget their entire relationship?</p><p>He wasn’t sure he could.</p><p>On May fifteenth, he kissed Davey one more time. He was proud of himself for not crying right then and there, outside of Davey’s building. Davey squeezed his hands tight and kissed him back, and looked sad, but neither of them said anything to stop the Plan.</p><p>“Goodnight.”</p><p>“Night.”</p><p>And when Jack was already a few paces away down the sidewalk, Davey said goodbye. And Jack almost choked on the words, but he managed to say goodbye back, and then he managed to keep himself from crying until he was sure Davey couldn’t see him.</p><p>And then he cried all night long.</p><p>He was exhausted and he had a headache when he walked across the stage on May sixteenth. He’d almost started crying again when Davey had walked across the stage, too. And he could barely make himself smile for pictures with Mama Medda and Charlie and the whole gang, and even though there were only ten feet between him and Davey on opposite sides of the group picture, it felt like the distance to the moon.</p><p>Because he couldn’t reach out and take Davey’s hand. He couldn’t pose for goofy pictures with Davey for his family. He survived a hug from Mrs. Jacobs and a handshake from Mr. Jacobs and Les, who was fifteen and way too big for that sort of thing, launched himself onto Jack’s back, laughing.</p><p>He knew that Sarah had already known about the Plan, and she treated him like normal, only with none of the teasing about hurting her brother Jack had always gotten from her, which was good, because Jack was hurting plenty and couldn’t think about if Davey felt the same, because that would only hurt worse.</p><p>And that night, Mama helped him carry his boxes and canvasses and probably six hundred dollars of stolen art supplies out of his dorm and into her car, and let him brood for the entire ride home with his headphones on and sad music playing.</p><p>And he spent that summer having to resist texting Davey every time something good happened like he had for three and a half years. And having to force himself to remember that he didn’t have a boyfriend anymore. And also crying. There was plenty of that.</p><p>He loved Davey. So much that he couldn’t even bring himself to change the contact name in his phone to not have the heart in it anymore.</p><p>But he’d get over it.</p><p>Surely, he’d eventually get over it.</p><p>Right?</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>i was originally gonna end on this chapter and then i realized it wouldn't feel like a happy ending if i did so I'm writing an epilogue you're welcome jsjhgfjhsgfs</p><p>anyway as is always the case here on spracejunkie.ao3 I'm Asper! Comments are like my main fuel source at this point so please leave on if you have something to say! getting that email is like an instant serotonin boost lmao</p><p>also come say hi on tumblr! @loving-jack-kelly where I'm currently constantly losing my shit over Matt Murdock and Jack Kelly</p>
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<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Epilogue</h2></a>
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    <p>Jack had never had a gallery show before.</p><p>He’d had a few paintings hanging in galleries. Two cityscapes had sold a couple of years ago for enough that he didn’t have to spare a passing thought about rent for a good six months, and every once in a while somebody found his stuff online and liked it enough to put it in their gallery for a little while, or buy it and display it with the other stuff in their front room.</p><p>But he’d never had an entire room all to himself, a place to hang what ended up being twenty-three of his very own original works for an entire month for people to see and (hopefully) buy.</p><p>He wasn’t so sure any of these paintings would sell, though.</p><p>They were all beautiful, he thought. He was proud of all of them, for sure. They were special. Unique.</p><p>But they were also very personal. Not the kind of thing he thought anybody would be hanging in their living room.</p><p>He’d gotten to choose the layout of the room. To choose the style of frame the gallery used, and to write each of the little blurbs stuck to the wall under the name tags next to each painting.</p><p>It was such a nice gallery. Not one of the blindingly bright white modern ones, one with warm hardwood floors and perfectly soft light, and with acoustics that made it feel impossible to talk loudly, leaving the art to fill the space and the air exactly as it should be.</p><p>And now, when somebody walked into the back room, the first thing they would see would be Jack’s art. Specifically, they’d see “Blue Raspberry.”</p><p>He’d painted it again. Made it a little more vague, taking out some of the details and making it even less obvious who it was off.</p><p>The original he’d called “Davey Blue,” and it was sitting in his living room, on the easel over the storyboards for his book.</p><p>But this one was Blue Raspberry, and it was still Davey, just not quite as Davey as the original. No fingerprints pressed into it, and not quite as much emotion in it.</p><p>There was still emotion, for sure. It just wasn’t quite as intensely emotional as the original.</p><p>And the blurb under it said, “is there anything more precious than the first time something that used to be sad is happy?”</p><p>Davey had laughed when he’d read it, and squeezed Jack’s hand and kissed his hair, and understood the double meaning.</p><p>The first time blue was the color of something beloved, and the first time this painting, in its original form, meant a new chance instead of a lost love.</p><p>And right past Blue Raspberry was “Cold Lemonade,” all bright yellows with hints of oranges and the tiniest bit of pink, the same style. Charlie.</p><p>“You knocked me off my feet and I knocked your foot off. Even?”</p><p>And “Pink Hydrangea,” the brightest pinks he could find. Mama Medda, “you’re safe when everything hurts, always.”</p><p>Twenty-three paintings in twenty-three sets of colors. There were repeats, kind of. Itey and Buttons were both shades of purple, and Specs, Race, Barney Peanuts, and Boots were all orange. But every painting was different, the colors blending differently, different undertones and centers of movement, different flow, and emotion. Each named for what Jack thought of as their color, the exact shade that described them.</p><p>Dragon’s Breath. Sunset Pink. Stormy Sky. City Signs.</p><p>And under each, a blurb aimed directly at the person he’d painted. He didn’t care if nobody else understood them, each painting was for one person and as long as they understood, that was enough.</p><p>Like, Sniper would get his joke about spitballs because she’d been the one to hit him, and so would anyone who knew both of them, but Sniper would, and that was what was important. If a stranger saw the dancing figure in warm ginger-brown and wondered what the hell that had to do with spitballs, so be it. Sniper would know.</p><p>And Mush would see himself in bright, bright red, and understand the comment about green tea breakdowns, and that was enough.</p><p>And any strangers passing through would get a glimpse into Jack’s head. Let’s be real, most people coming here were probably coming because they’d read his book, and probably most of them would be able to guess that the walls of this gallery were covered in pieces of his own jigsaw family. They'd be able to see, hopefully, how true his dedication was.</p><p><i>To my very own jigsaw family, with more love than a million pictures could show even if they were each worth a thousand words</i>.</p><p>He’d never be able to get it all out there, how much he loved each and every one of them, but this was pretty damn close, all things considered. Hardly a million pictures, but one for each person he loved so much he could hardly stand it.</p><p>On the night his show opened, he had to get dressed up.</p><p>Davey had watched him get ready and laughed. Re-tied his tie for him.</p><p>Kissed him before they walked out the door.</p><p>Held his hand when they walked into the gallery.</p><p>And just like that, the piece that had been missing from the center of Jack’s jigsaw puzzle life was firmly back in place where he belonged, and all was right.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>we made it folks! this wip got finished and not abandoned and now I really am paul-rudd-look-at-us.gif lmao</p><p>as always, I'm Asper @loving-jack-kelly and i live off of comments so shoot me one! thanks for reading all the way to the end, i love you dearly for it!</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>hello hello hello it's me again Asper back at you again with another fic nobody asked for instead of an update that anybody wants!! anyway I'm here as always to beg for comments because I love them and that's all goodnight!!!</p><p>actually it isn't because I'm hype for this fic and i need everyone else to be too so please for the love of god indulge me bye</p></blockquote></div></div>
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